Joe Picurro was one of thousands of men and women who showed up at Ground Zero on September 11th to help with the rescue and recovery efforts. He was thirty-four years old at the time.
Now Joe is dying. His doctor has told him he has the lungs of a ninety-five-year-old. His lungs are so inflamed from all the tiny particles of glass and even human bone fragments lodged in them that every breath produces excruciating pain. He’s been unable to work for the last five years and takes thirty-seven different medicines.
I watched like everybody else; on the TV, I watched the towers go down. And I have policemen and firemen in my family, and I knew the kind of equipment they carried, and I knew they didn’t have the kind of equipment to cut that steel. So I grabbed some of my tools, and I jumped in my car, and I went up there.
I threw my tools in, and I walked into, into hell. And just surreal. I never seen anything like it. There was I was literally tripping over body parts. You know, we were putting them in five-gallon buckets for the first couple hours I was there. And, you know, it was bad.
And I stayed there twenty-eight days. I stayed there fourteen days total at first, and then I came home for eight days, and I went back for another fourteen days. The first couple of days I slept on the floor of the American Express building, because they didn’t have anywhere else for us to sleep, that I knew about, anyway. And so, I slept in the dust and the glass in the American Express building, when I could.
within minutes you got down there, you started coughing. All the air was filled with dust, though, and, every time you moved, you kicked up dust. I mean, it was knee deep in some spots, you know. It was pretty surreal. You know, you couldn’t see what you were stepping on, what you’re tripping over.
Part of the street fell in. Me and a bunch of firemen started running. They grabbed me and said, “Run!” And the street was falling in. And then I ran, and then I realized I was running alone. They were running back, so I turned around and went back with them.
Right now I’m hooked up to my oxygen machine. You know, my lungs are—I went to the doctor yesterday, and it was—we didn’t get good news. Basically, the doctor said, you know, if he could get me another year or two, you know, he would, he’d be surprised. And so, I’m on thirty-seven medications—well, actually thirty-nine; he put me on two more, you know, when I went to see him yesterday.
And, you know, most of my problems come from my lungs, but my whole body is racked with pain, all my joints. It’s just like a laundry list of problems. If it’s not one thing, it’s another, you know? Breathing, like I said, is the hardest. Like I said, I’m hooked up to oxygen now. My lungs have concrete and glass and human bone fragments in them. And, you know, so what happens is your lungs are the only organ that rejuvenate themselves, and mine, instead of growing viable lung tissue, they’re growing—it’s growing scar tissue. So it’s making my lungs get bigger and bigger. And when I take a deep breath, my lungs actually rub against my ribs, and it hurts.
I go through these vomiting bouts, where my throat is torn up from the glass and the stuff I inhaled and also from throwing up. And it’s caused my teeth to rot from throwing up, and the medicine that I’m on. I had to have a tooth pulled just last month.
we fought for—me and my wife fought for four years, I think, almost four years, just to get workman’s comp, which was originally started at 125 every two weeks, $125 every two weeks, and then we went back into court, and I got it bumped up to $250 every two weeks. So I get a total of $500—[coughing]—excuse me. I get a total of $500 a month from New York as compensation.
It doesn’t cost me anything, thank God. They send—they do pay for my medication. It comes from IWP, Injured Workers Pharmacy, and it comes through the mail. Matter of fact, I’m waiting for a delivery this morning. Some of my pain medication and some of my new breathing medication is coming this morning.
REP. CAROLYN MALONEY: Well, I’ve introduced legislation for seven years. We know that on 9/11 almost 3,000 people died, but thousands more lost their health, like Joe. And it has been progressive, and there has not been the support and help for them. Along with a New York delegation, we have secured funding for special programs, such as the Mount Sinai program and the Bellevue program and other programs. Centers for Excellence, we call them. But it’s a fight every year. We need a long-term program to help people like Joe.
And we remember those days. I remember the signs, looking missing—looking for people that were missing. But there were more signs for ironworkers than anything else. “Ironworkers, report to duty.” “Retired ironworkers, where are you?” “Ironworkers, come, help, help, help.” Well, many came, like Joe. They were not paid. Many were volunteers. People came from all over the country. It’s just not New York workers, but New Jersey. I did a study. Out of the 435 congressional seats, 432 congressional seats sent workers, volunteers, to work at Ground Zero.
And the bill would cover monitoring for everyone who was exposed to the deadly toxins. It wasn’t air; it was like Juan described it: it was soup. You could literally eat it. It was thick. So, everyone who was exposed, and treatment for everyone who was sick. And it reopens the Victims Compensation Board. The Victims Compensation Board helped the families, the innocent families, and victims and the firefighters and officers and police and volunteers who died that day. But in a sense, those who made a decision to walk into the flames, they made just as much of a sacrifice, and many, many, many are sick and dying, like Joe.
I was down on 9/12. There were no masks. People were just working in the debris. As Joe said, you could—it was almost like walking through snow. It was like something I’ve never seen. You would walk through this—it’s not mist. It was like walking through a soup up to your knees. And the air was very, very thick. And many, many are sick, and we don’t know the long-term impact, the cancers that may be there. That’s why the bill is for thirty years, to cover not only now, but other illnesses that may and will develop because of the exposure to these toxins.
DR. JACQUELINE MOLINE: Well, in our consortium, our Centers of Excellence, we are following about 27,000 folks. We’ve seen them in for a monitoring exam and continue to follow them with annual exams. We’ve been doing this since 2002, thanks to Congresswoman Maloney and the leadership she has shown in getting the funds to these programs so that we can have these programs. And also we’ve been able to treat them with federal funds since 2006.
What we’re seeing are problems of the respiratory tract, of the upper respiratory tract, the lower respiratory tract, gastroesophageal reflux disease, post-traumatic stress disorder, anxiety, depression. These problems that began in 2001 continue to 2009 and will continue in the years to come.
What we’re also seeing is unusual patterns of disease presentation. We just recently published a paper that showed that—we saw a group of younger workers at the site who developed a cancer of the immune system and multiple myeloma. And while it’s premature to be able to say that rates, in general, are elevated as a result of the exposures, what we’re seeing is an unusual age distribution. It’s a cancer usually we see in sixty- or seventy-year-old folks. And we saw four people under the age of forty-five. We’ve also seen other folks who are in the younger age category, much higher than we would expect. We would expect one person with cancer under forty-five in the size of the population that we’re following.
We’re on the alert for emerging diseases. We’re on the alert for disease patterns that are unusual. The severity of disease that some people are showing is unexpected. And that’s why it is so critical for us to have this long-term funding. It isn’t just something that happened in the first weeks and months, or even in the first few years. What we need to do is be able to follow the health of folks as we move into a period of time where any long-term diseases that might occur will start manifesting themselves.
Between Mount Sinai and our partners, we have seen almost 28,000 folks that have come through for a monitoring examination. An additional 15,000 individuals who work for the Fire Department are seen in their program. There are also some folks who are being treated who lived or worked in the environment.
JOE PICURRO:
they told us—Christine Whitman stood there, and I don’t care what she says about it. She said the pile was different. She’s a liar. I was standing there. She did not say that the air was different on the pile. She stood on the pile with her mask below her neck and talked to us and told us we were heroes and said the air was fine, and she put the mask back on, and she got back in her car, and she left, you know, and went back to New Jersey where it was safe. So she’s a liar, and that’s all she is.
____
Joe Picurro
former freelance ironworker. He worked at Ground Zero after 9/11 and is suffering from terminal lung disease. He is forty-two years old.
Rep. Carolyn Maloney (D – New York)
co-sponsor of the 9/11 Health and Compensation Act.
Dr. Jacqueline Moline
director of the World Trade Center Medical Monitoring and Treatment Program at the Mount Sinai School of Medicine.
— source democracynow.org
Around 3,000 people died in 9/11 terrorist attack. US went to war to a non related country named Iraq for revenge. But more than 20000 people are dying who did voluntary work. US govt not seeing them. So who is the real terrorist?